Education Week

From my journal: March 6, 2010

Yesterday, we held our school’s first ever spelling bee and field day in honor of Education Week.  Last year we didn’t do anything for Education Week because we had two funerals the same week, and our school has never done anything in the past.  So this year I wanted to plan a big event to get the students excited about studying, and the parents interested in their children’s education.  It turned out more successful than I ever could have hoped.  By the end of the day, I was so happy and so were the students and parents. 

The day began with spelling bees for all the classes, and singing songs they had learned in class.  Then we ate lunch.  The students brought fried fish and the teachers brought rice and cold coffee.  Someone also brought cupcakes just for the students.  In the afternoon we played games.

The students got really excited about the spelling bee.  I gave each class a list of 100 words or so to study two weeks in advance.  All I heard for those two weeks outside of class was the kids spelling words.  It made me very happy to see them studying so hard.  By the time the day of the contest arrived, a lot of the kids knew all the words.  But with the microphone and speakers I brought in from the church and all the parent spectators, many of the kids were nervous and made mistakes on words they knew.  But most of them did really well and I was very proud of all of them.

The games we played in the afternoon were a hilarious good time, too.  All the students were divided into two teams, the Red Team and the Blue Team.  And they all wore red or blue shirts depending on their team.  The winners of all the events earned points for their team.  The team with the most points at the end of the day won.  (In case you’re interested, Team Blue won with 100 points to 74.  Go Team Blue!)

First, we played Freeze Dance, where all the students danced to music from my iPod, and whenever I stopped the music they all had to freeze and whoever moved was out.  We danced for 10 minutes and whoever was left standing by the end won a point for their team.  Then we played musical rocks, kind of like musical chairs only because we didn’t have enough chairs I decided to use rocks instead.  The students danced around in a circle with rocks on the floor in the middle, one less than the number of students.  When the music stopped, they had to dive to the center of the circle and grab a rock.  The student without a rock was out.  This continued until there was only one student left.  We played this game by class so that the 8^th graders wouldn’t crush the little kindergartners in the scramble for the rocks.  This activity was by far the best because my students love to shake it to the music and there was lots of screaming and cheering from the participants and audience.

Then we headed outside for a cross-dress relay where the boys ran around the field in Guam dresses and headbands, sunglasses and sandals slicked up with coconut oil, and then handed off the clothes to the next boy in line.  After the boys displayed their feminine sides to the community, we had a bag race using the big burlap copra bags.  And, finally, to wrap up the festivities, we had a race from one end of Ine to the other.

All in all, the day was a huge success.  It brought a big crowd from the community to the school to watch the students.  The congressmen even came, along with the pastor, to give speeches.  The night before, I had major anxiety that it would be a big disaster, that nobody would remember to bring food or nobody would show up, but the only little glitch was that our schedule went according to Marshallese time.  We had planned to start at 8 a.m., so of course we had opening prayer at 11:30, ate lunch at 3 p.m., and ended the day at 6:30 p.m., all in very Marshallese fashion.

Next year we want to include Jabo and Matolen schools in the festivities and have a trophy to give to the winning team.  I say “we” because I’m not ready to think about myself not being here next year.  The students keep asking if I’ll be coming back next year and it breaks my heart to have to say no.  I still love it here and am not ready to leave.  I’m healthy and happy and teaching only gets easier.